Friday, January 25, 2008

Rise: Blood Hunter (2007)

I can't trust Lucy Liu anymore. I gave her a pass on Ecks vs. Severbecause that also starred Antonio Banderas who's another of my favorites, so I figured that sometimes good people can make bad movies and I decided to forget about it and move on. But now...

I'm sorry, Lucy. I love you, but I don't trust your judgment in films. If it's any consolation, I feel the same way about Michael Caine and Kenneth Branagh.

This isn't really a review because I didn't even finish Rise: Blood Hunter. Lucy's good in it, but the movie started to lose me about the time that she's kidnapped and raped by a couple of vampires (James D'Arcy and Carla Gugino). I forced myself to sit through it (it's not especially graphic, even in the unrated version, but it's not pleasant or even necessary either), but I gave up once Lucy picks up a hitchiker and kills him for his blood.

What I saw along the way was a lot of T&A and even more blood. I don't mind nudity, but this wasn't even attractive nudity. It was skanky nudity and that gets old fast. I don't mind movie gore either, but an excess of it is usually an indication that the movie-makers are trying to distract us from the lack of something else, and that's definitely the case here.

As far as I could tell after about half-an-hour, the plot's a pretty simple revenge deal with Michael Chiklis thrown in as a good-hearted cop who's investigating a series of bloody deaths. I think I might have gotten to like Chiklis had I kept with it, but I was so disappointed in Lucy's murdering the innocent hitchiker that I didn't care. And it's not like she just suddenly went blood-crazy and attacked him because she wasn't in control. She stopped and picked him up, questioned him to make sure he didn't have any dependents, then drove him into an empty park and sliced his throat open with a cross-shaped weapon specially designed for the job.

So, I gave it thirty minutes and all I could see was a movie about a bunch of unlikable people killing each other. Who cares?